He trailed his lips down the side of her neck, his thumbs continuing to caress her nipples.
“Why not?” he demanded.
Yeah, why not?
The question whirled through her fuzzy mind as her body continued to quiver with unfulfilled need. It would be so easy to give in. To allow the exquisite passion to overwhelm her.
Then the memory of fifteen long, empty years without a damned word from this man blasted away her lingering desire.
“You had your chance and you blew it,” she said, as much to remind herself as Lucas.
Lifting his head, he studied her flushed face with a brooding gaze.
“Would you believe me if I told you that I never meant to hurt you?”
She gave a sharp shake of her head. “No.”
He grimaced at her stark refusal to listen to his excuses for dumping her.
“I thought I was doing what was for the best,” he insisted.
“You don’t have to explain, Lucas.” Batting away his hands, Mia took a step back. “I knew from the start that the daughter of a gardener was never going to be good enough for a precious St. Clair.” She shrugged. “If my heart broke, I don’t have anyone to blame but myself.”
His hands lifted, as if he intended to pull her into his arms, only to drop back to his sides when she stiffened in rejection.
“You have it completely backward, Mia,” he said, the words clipped. “We were the ones who weren’t worthy of you.”
She rolled her eyes. The old “it’s not you, it’s me” excuse.
“Yeah, right.”
“It’s true,” he insisted, gazing down at her with a fierce intensity. “You were so gloriously innocent.”
“Not for long.”
He sucked in a sharp breath, as if she’d managed to land a direct hit.
“Damn, Mia.”
She grimaced. Okay, that was below the belt. Lucas hadn’t done anything to her that she hadn’t begged him to do.
“It doesn’t matter,” she muttered.
He eased forward, his thumb tracing the line of her clenched jaw.
“You’re right,” he admitted, regret darkening his eyes. “I took your innocence, but I wasn’t going to steal your joyous nature.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked before she could halt the words.
“I wasn’t going to let the St. Clair clan turn you into a plastic model version of Mia Ramon,” he said, his fingers skimming down her neck while he studied her with a somber expression. “They would have destroyed you in an effort to make you the proper daughter-in-law.”
Her breath tangled in her throat. Dammit. She didn’t want to listen to his soft, persuasive words.
“I’m not completely spineless,” she snapped.
His lips twisted. “No, but you were young, and worse, you didn’t have a mother who would have told my parents to go screw themselves.” He thankfully didn’t point out that her father wasn’t interested enough in his daughter to care how she was being treated by the St. Clair family. “Eventually you would have been molded into someone you didn’t want to be.” His hand slid beneath her hair to cup her nape in a possessive gesture. “Trust me, I know.”
Mia glanced away as the memory of Nora St. Clair’s crushing disapproval seeped through her. For a young, impressionable girl it’d been unnerving to know that she’d been condemned as unworthy without ever being given the opportunity to prove how much she loved Lucas.
So maybe she had been anxious to show the older couple that she could be exactly what they wanted in a daughter-in-law. And maybe she had tried to conform to their expectations.. . .
Abruptly realizing that he was forcing her to question the bitterness she’d deliberately harbored for the past fifteen years, she returned her gaze to his impossibly beautiful face.
“As I said, it doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.” He lowered his head until his lips were brushing against her forehead. “There hasn’t been a day that’s passed when I don’t regret my decision not to take you with me when I left.”
A voice in the back of her head told her to walk away. What was the point in dissecting their painful past? But now she had to know.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was an idiot.” There was an edge of self-disgust in his voice. “I was still hoping I could somehow earn my parents’ approval.”
“And now?”
His lips nuzzled over her temple and down to her ear. “Now I don’t give a shit.”
Despite her best efforts, she believed him.
She believed that he had truly thought he was doing what was best for her. And that he’d left in an effort to protect her from his parents.
That didn’t mean she intended to forgive him, she swiftly assured herself. He should have explained why he was leaving. Instead he’d let her believe that he’d abandoned her because she was unworthy.
The fear had left wounds that’d never fully healed.
Still, it did make it even more difficult to resist the warm kisses that moved over her upturned face.
She wanted to lean forward and feel his arms wrap around her shivering body. She wanted to bury her fingers in his hair and kiss him until they were both drowning in pleasure.
It was the sheer intensity of that need that had her stumbling backward, her hand lifting to touch her cheek that still tingled from the heat of his lips.
“I need to get back to work,” she breathed.
Lucas grimaced, as if he was in pain. And maybe he was. If he was even half as sexually frustrated as she was, then he no doubt felt like punching something.
“Wait, Mia,” he demanded.
She eyed him warily. “What?”
“You haven’t told me what you discovered.”
Oh. She swallowed a sigh. She really didn’t want to share, but she’d made a deal.
“Not much.” She rolled her eyes as his expression tightened with suspicion. “Seriously. I asked Burt if he knew how his brother made his money, but he claimed that Tony had never told any of them. Burt did say that Tony had been helping his mother out since high school.”
“High school?” Lucas frowned. “Interesting.”
“Burt also agreed to let me use my key to check out Tony’s condo tomorrow.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” she said. “I didn’t want to press him while he’s still grieving. Besides, he wasn’t very close to Tony. I doubt he knows anything that can help.”
Lucas planted his fists on his hips. “Damn.”
A trickle of fear inched down her spine at his blatant disappointment. His reaction reminded her that there was more than Tony’s murder to worry about.
“Why do you think he had that photo of me?” she demanded.
His eyes darkened, his features tightening with a grim concern. “I don’t know, but I think it worried him enough to come to Houston and ask for my help.”
“I do too.” She wrapped her arms around her waist, her mouth suddenly dry. “God.”
Lucas reached to cup her cheek in his palm. “Mia?”
She put her worst fear into words. “He might have been killed because of me.”
Lucas’s brows snapped together. “He was killed because some ruthless bastard put a bullet in his heart.”
“But—”
“No,” he interrupted, his fingers tightening on her face. “You have no responsibility for this. Period.”
Chapter Nine
Lucas glared down at his companion, barely resisting the urge to give her a small shake. How the hell could she waste even a second blaming herself?
When he’d known Tony, the younger man had been a drug user, a petty thief, and a habitual liar. He doubted that the years had changed him much.
The odds had always been that he’d end up dead. Or in jail.
Of course, Mia was too stubborn to simply accept his assurances.
“That’s not true and we both know it,” she muttered.
br />
Lucas made a sound of impatience. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve tried to tell myself that Tony was killed because of his connections to drugs.” She shivered. “Or because he owed the wrong person money.”
“Both legitimate assumptions,” he said.
“But neither explains why he had my picture or why it had a threat written on it,” she pressed. “This has something to do with me.”
There was no way to argue. The picture proved the crime had to have some connection to Mia. But he wasn’t going to let her assume that she was responsible for Tony’s death.
“It could still be because of something Tony was involved in.”
“Lucas—”
He pressed his thumb against her lips. “No. Hear me out,” he insisted. “It’s very likely that Tony was messed up in illegal activities. The fact he could afford to work a few months out of the year proves that he had an alternative source of income.” He held her gaze, willing her to believe him. “It’s quite likely whoever shot him was afraid that Tony either shared some detail about his secret life with you or you saw something that you weren’t supposed to see. They wanted to make sure you could never talk.”
Mia took a long moment to consider his words. It was a habit she’d had even when she was just a teenager.
She would never leap to conclusions or simply give in to whatever everyone else believed. She would listen to an argument, then make her own decisions.
At least she did until his mother managed to undermine her self-confidence.
Yet another reason he’d gone away.
“Why not just kill me themselves?” she at last demanded.
It was a question that had haunted Lucas since he’d seen the photo.
“Maybe to make a point,” he said. It was the most reasonable explanation. “Forcing Tony to kill one of his few friends would teach him to keep his mouth shut.”
She furrowed her brow. “But instead, he went to see you.”
“Yes.” Lucas still didn’t know how Tony knew that he was in Houston. Or why he’d chosen him to help. He could only assume that Tony was smart enough to know that Lucas was the one person in the world who would do whatever necessary to protect Mia. “They underestimated his loyalty to you.”
“So they killed him,” she said in pained tones.
He allowed his fingers to skim over her cheek, tucking a satiny curl behind her ear.
“Can you think of anything Tony might have said?”
She bit her lower lip, obviously searching through her mind for anything that might help.
“No,” she finally said, heaving a frustrated sigh. “I haven’t seen or spoken to Tony in months.”
“He didn’t send you anything, or ask you to keep anything safe for him?” he asked. If Tony was spooked he might have turned to Mia for help.
She shook her head. “No.”
“Not even at the office?”
“I don’t think he was ever at the new offices,” she told him. “But I can check in the sheds and the truck he used.”
“I’ll have Max take care of that,” he said, tapping her nose when she jutted her chin to a stubborn angle. Not surprisingly, she didn’t like the thought of a stranger poking around her property. “He’s a forensic expert,” he informed her. “More importantly, he’s OCD when it comes to the most miniscule detail. We might overlook something important, but he won’t.”
“Okay,” she grudgingly conceded. “What do you want me to do?”
He gazed down at her wide, velvet brown eyes. What he wanted was to take her to his elegant condo in Houston. Or better yet, to get on a plane that would whisk them to some remote, tropical island.
Unfortunately, he knew she didn’t trust him enough to leave Shreveport until they found Tony’s killer.
Not yet.
“Are there any other friends whom Tony might have confided in?” he forced himself to ask.
“None that I know of.” Her eyes grew distant, as if she was remembering Tony when the two of them had been young and left to run the streets without supervision. “He was acquainted with everyone in town, but I don’t think he actually had any friends.”
“I—” A sharp knock on the front door interrupted Lucas’s words. He instinctively reached to touch his holstered gun. “Were you expecting company?”
“No. I’m never home during the day.”
She was moving before he could halt her, heading into the living room so she could peek around the edge of the curtain. Lucas was quickly posed directly behind her, catching a glimpse of the man who was standing on the porch.
“Do you recognize him?” he asked, his gaze moving over the brown hair that was sprinkled with gray and the pudgy body that was stuffed into a hand-tailored suit.
“Frazer Hart,” she muttered. “He’s Vicky Fontaine’s lawyer.”
Lucas’s attention shifted to Mia’s tense profile. Clearly she wasn’t happy at the arrival of the unexpected visitor.
“Why would Vicky Fontaine’s lawyer be knocking on your door?”
“She’s been trying to buy my dad’s house and land since he died.”
Lucas easily recalled the older woman. She’d been a friend of his mother. Or rather, they pretended to be friends while each of them tried to outdo each other in the small, highly competitive social scene. Then, while Lucas was still in high school, Vicky’s husband had run off with millions of dollars that he’d embezzled from the pension funds of the state of Louisiana. It was rumored he was living in Belize with a lover half his age.
The scandal had tarnished the older woman, but she’d refused to retreat into her mansion and lick her wounds. No. Vicky Fontaine had continued to maintain the same opulent, exceedingly public lifestyle that she’d always enjoyed. And within a few months, she’d managed to overcome her faithless husband and the nasty gossip that would have destroyed a lesser woman.
“Why would she want a patch of swampland?”
“I have no idea,” Mia muttered. “All I know is that she’s been driving me crazy.”
Lucas frowned. It was a long shot that Vicky’s interest in the land had anything to do with Tony’s death, but he intended to check it out.
Hell, right now he was desperate enough to follow any clue. No matter how ridiculous.
“Has anyone else shown an interest in your dad’s property?”
Mia shrugged. “Not really.”
There was more pounding on the door. “Ms. Ramon?”
Mia tensed, and Lucas ran a soothing hand down her back.
“Don’t worry. I’ll get rid of him.”
“Good. I need to get back to work.” She straightened, jerking away from his lingering hand.
Lucas hid his smile as he pulled his phone from his pocket and sent a quick message to Max. Obviously his touch bothered Mia more than she wanted to admit.
Good.
He wanted her bothered.
And hot. And aching.
And willing.
His phone pinged as Max swiftly answered his text. Sliding the phone in his pocket, he walked Mia to the kitchen and waited while she gathered her purse before they moved toward the back door.
“Wait at the side of the house,” he commanded, grabbing a jacket that was hanging from a hook and wrapping it around her shoulders. He didn’t care if she glared at him or not. The light rain continued to fall from the gray clouds, adding a chill to the air. “Max is on his way to pick you up and take you back to the office.”
“That’s not . . .” Her words trailed away as he glared down at her. His expression must have warned her that she wasn’t going to win this argument. She heaved a faint sigh of resignation. “Fine.”
Grasping the lapels of her jacket, he coaxed her forward, his entire body clenching with need as the soft swell of her breasts hit his chest.
It seemed crazy, but he was beginning to suspect that his libido had been running on autopilot, simply waiting for this woman to turn it back on.
Now it was making up for lost time.
“We’ll finish our conversation over dinner,” he said.
Her dark eyes heated with a ready response, her tongue peeking out to wet her dry lips. But even as he watched the tiny pulse at the base of her throat race with desire, she was pretending she didn’t recognize the heat that sizzled between them.
“What conversation?”
He wanted to lean down and cover that fluttering pulse with his lips. He wanted the warm, sultry taste of her skin on his tongue.
Better yet, he wanted to lick a path down her body to discover the sweet honey between her legs.
“The one where you tell me that you forgive me for the past and agree to give me another chance,” he murmured, his voice thickening.
She trembled even as her hands lifted to press against his chest.
“Why would I do that?”
He held her gaze. “Because you’ve missed me.”
“I’ve done just fine since you left.”
His lips twitched. She hadn’t denied his accusation that she’d missed him.
“Are you happy?”
“Of course.”
His gaze lowered to her mouth. Over the years he’d devoted a lot of time imagining those lush lips.
“I could make you happier,” he assured her with a slow, wicked smile.
“Sex?”
“It’s much more than that,” he swore. And it was true.
Did he want this woman in his bed? Hell, yeah. But much more importantly he wanted her trust, and her friendship, and her heart.
He wanted to earn a place back in her life.
“Yeah, I bet,” she muttered, not quite able to hide the hint of vulnerability that softened the tense line of her mouth.
Regret sliced through him. Lifting his hand, he cupped her cheek. “Mia. I’m not too proud to say it,” he murmured in soft tones. “I’ve missed you.”
She released a shaky breath, swaying forward as he lowered his head. His lips barely brushed over her mouth when the sound of pounding resumed.
“Lucas,” she muttered. “The door.”
He nuzzled a line of kisses along the edge of her jaw. “He’ll go away.”